Learning takes a long time

Off-topic...

The tens of thousands of hours that I put into developing intellectually didn't feel like a slog – it was fascinating.

That's the whole point... You can keep saying that "Scott is not bad at math, he just didn't put in the required 10k hours" but if the difference between those good at something and the rest of us is that to them putting 10k hours into learning that something doesn't "feel like a slog".

It is a truism that learning takes time. The issue is that we punish people for taking time to learn thoroughly. Our training/education regimes are largely designed to turn out large numbers of semi-numerate engineers in a short time rather than to produce any number of fluent scientists of any period of time.

I like these posts, thanks for writing them!

The tens of thousands of hours that I put into developing intellectually didn't feel like a slog – it was fascinating. It was the same for all of the deepest thinkers who I know.

What makes you think that spending that time on thinking is untypical for LW?

The only difference is that different people didn't spend their time developing intellectually the same way.

Let me approach this from another angle. I've been playing the flute since I was 5. Counting the several competitions and the 5 hours a day I used to practice. I've spent more than 10K hours. I probably passed that when I was 12 or 13. I've now gotten to the place where I can go for a few weeks at a time and then pick up the flute and be able to play it with aplomb and ease without degradation in skill. Learning does take a long time and even though music is/was still my life, it can be a slog and there isn't really a faster way to do it especially on very complicated things (like being a novelist) because of the nature of forging the new pathways in our brains.

In my mind this is a great argument for broad-based classical education that touches on a variety of subjects and lets students then specialize in a field of study. It gets your brain ready for learning, gives you plenty of knowledge and helps you with your communication skills so that you can do what I do: explain really complicated things to a general audience. It also gives you the chance to speak knowledgeably with other knowledge brokers. In some ways, that is what our society has lost with excess specialization. Look at this site, how many people would benefit from a holistic education in philosophy but are unwilling to put in the hours and study it takes to learn about the conundrums of philosophy?

I think is a great argument for broad education.

I recently realized that I had greatly overestimated the inferential distance between most of my readers and myself.

It looks to me as if you mean underestimated. (If not, then you've underestimated the inferential distance between at least one reader and yourself this time.)

Data point/encouragement: I'm getting a lot out of these, and I hope you keep writing them.

I'm one of those could-have-beens who dropped mathematics early on despite a strong interest and spent the next decade thinking he sucked at math before he rediscovered numerical proclivites in his early 20's because FAI theory caused him to peek at Discrete Mathematics.

Anyone know/have advice on:

• making the most of time spent on the deep thinking?
• methods to find the best/most-diversely-explained sources of information?

One of my reference experiences in that domain is trying to teach the idea of recursion to a bioinformatics freshman. It was right before the exam, after one semester of Haskell.

At that moment I understood why the university teaches that semester of Haskell. The idea of recursion is important and doesn't come naturally to people. It's just worthwhile to spend a semester with a language that most of the students aren't going to use afterwards because recursion is that important and that hard for students to learn. It's simply takes a few months to get that idea into a brain.

Excellent post. The question is how to learn how to communicate to a general audience. I imagine it takes practise moreso than study, and that most books would only provide insights into one aspect of the problem while ignoring others. But some that come to mind are: Pinker's Sense of Style, some of edge.org The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing. It also might be useful to attempt to reverse-engineer the writing of people like Richard Feynmann or Oliver Sacks, or the speech of people like Bill Nye, Karl Kruszelnicki, etc. Also, the principles of science communication are probably fairly related to the principles of all nonfiction communication so one could also look further afield.

I missed the fact that most of my readers aren't in the habit of spending ~10 hours carefully reading a dense article

I'm a bit confused -- are you referring to one of your LessWrong articles? Were you anticipating that readers would spend ~10 hours reading and thinking about it before commenting?